Dreamforce 25 - Certinia's COO on transparency, strategic discipline, and building trust

Among the packed schedule of sessions and announcements at Dreamforce 2025, Certinia's Chief Operating Officer Robert Cesafsky offered something particularly valuable: operational honesty. Over the course of a conversation during the event, Cesafsky revealed an organization building its AI strategy on a foundation of transparency, measured investment, and strategic clarity about keeping a complex product portfolio aligned.

Finding strategic clarity

When a new leadership team joined in late 2023, the company defined its position around managing "customers, projects, people and financials across the entire customer lifecycle journey" – a statement that now anchors every strategic decision.

Those three applications – PS Cloud (Professional Services Automation), CS Cloud (Customer Success Management), and FM Cloud (Financial Management) – can be deployed independently or together, giving customers flexibility while maintaining platform coherence. According to Cesafsky, this clarity has fundamentally reshaped how the company operates, from individual product roadmaps to customer support and partner ecosystem strategies.

Keeping three products moving as one

For Cesafsky, the definitional statement is more than marketing language – it has real operational implications. As he said to his team during the strategic planning process: 

I promise you it's not a marketing exercise. There's actually real world implications around this.

The challenge is ensuring that three distinct product lines evolve coherently while each serves its own market. Cesafsky describes a disciplined approach of reviewing overall strategy and where growth comes from, conducting risk assessments within the existing customer base, and rebalancing R&D investments annually based on strategic imperatives.

This isn't always straightforward. During the first year of repositioning, the leadership team recognized that Financial Management Cloud customers needed clearer signals about the solution's strategic importance. He recalls:

I think we had take stock and say, 'This is actually a core, strategic part of our solution set. We need to be investing into it. We need to be communicating that to both our customers and our prospects that it is a strategic part of our product portfolio'.

The company makes changes based on customer feedback and market dynamics, but always through the lens of that unifying statement – a framework that forces alignment across product roadmaps, go-to-market strategies, and support operations.

A roadmap grounded in reality

When it comes to AI specifically, Certinia has taken a systematic approach. The company currently has two agents on Salesforce's Agent Exchange platform, complementing generative AI capabilities already embedded in its core solutions.

But the most intriguing aspect is how concrete the roadmap is. The company has identified 164 unique tasks and actions performed by key personas: resource managers, service delivery managers, project managers, and consultants. Cesafsky explains: 

Our AI and agentic roadmap is actually quite easy. Think about what your users are doing today, and we want to more fully automate those.

Each of these 164 tasks ties back to specific ROI drivers – improvements in services win rates, more efficient resource management, higher billable utilization, and net reduction in systems and personnel used for resource and project management. It's a framework that makes the roadmap measurable rather than aspirational.

Importantly, Cesafsky is explicit about what Certinia is not doing with AI:

We're not going to be the company that stands up and proclaims that we were able to reduce headcount by 20% because we're deploying agents right now.

The focus remains on making professional services people more effective, not eliminating them. 

This also reflects a broader commitment to accountability. The company has developed a "Customer Success Scorecard" tracking ROI drivers across its 1,400+ customer base. 

But Cesafsky emphasizes willingness to acknowledge when promised outcomes aren't materializing. He notes that on the occasion when real-time data has revealed gaps between some longstanding ROI claims and actual customer results, the company either fixes the capability or stops claiming it – a level of honesty that connects to Cesafsky's principles about building customer trust.

The transparency imperative

For a 17-year-old company, managing stakeholder expectations while evolving presents unique challenges – and this is where Cesafsky's perspective becomes most revealing. Certinia began as FinancialForce, developing a General Ledger on Salesforce's platform. Over nearly two decades it has pivoted multiple times, and when stakeholders joined the ecosystem significantly influences their perception of what Certinia is. Cesafsky explains:

If you joined as a customer in 2010 you very much think about us as the finance system built on Salesforce. If you joined as a partner in 2017 your perspective is something around they want to be the business services ERP vendor.

Each era created a different mental model, and stakeholders naturally anchor to the version of the company they first encountered. Because each phase leaves its mark, he adds, that puts a responsibility on leadership:

Our job as leaders, our job as a vendor, is just to continually communicate as effectively, as clearly, as frequently as we can to all of those stakeholders within Certinia about where we are and where we're going,

When asked about maintaining trust, Cesafsky's response was unequivocal: 

It's imperative. There has to be trust. There has to be transparency with all of our people, both internally and with our customers as well.

My take

What emerges from this conversation is leadership that understands trust must be earned through transparency, not announcements. While plenty of vendors rush to claim AI transformation while struggling to articulate coherent platform strategies, Certinia's leadership is building something more durable – a culture of operational honesty paired with strategic clarity.

The details matter. The definitional statement that forces alignment across three products. The 164-task framework that makes automation concrete. The explicit rejection of headcount reduction as the primary AI goal. The willingness to course-correct as necessary with both investment and communication.

Cesafsky's approach reveals something crucial – customers don't need more AI announcements, they need vendors who understand how to keep complex product portfolios aligned while being honest about what works, what doesn't, and what they're still figuring out.

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